No Wii Hard Drive. Period. (For Now?)

Since the launch of the Wii there have been concerns of memory shortages and most of the Internet community seems to have expected the announcement of a hard drive for some time now.

by Sammy Barker Thu 1st Nov 2007

Nintendo have today squashed the rumours once again however, talking with Play.tm they said:

“The way that we look at it is, we really don’t want people storing every single game they buy on their drive,” responded Nintendo of America PR manager, Eric Walter.
“When you buy a game, it’s yours forever, so you can delete it, and go back and get it at any time you want. In a way, we liken it to putting music on your iPod; you listen to it for a while, and then you get tired of it, and you pull it off, and you put some new stuff on.”

While I totally see where Nintendo are coming from I sense that downloading, deleting and then re-downloading feels a little longwinded for my liking.

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Maybe the imminent launch of WiiWare will change Nintendo's mind.

[source play.tm]

As the Editor of Push Square, Sammy has over 15 years of experience analysing the world of PlayStation, from PS3 through PS5 and everything in between. He’s an expert on PS Studios and industry matters, as well as sports games and simulators. He also enjoys RPGs when he has the time to dedicate to them, and is a bit of a gacha whale.

1
antdickens
Thu 1st Nov 2007

They're going to have to introduce hard drives soon, they're talking Neo Geo sized ROMs on the SD Cards, not to mention that new Final Fantasy download game.. oh and the Wii Fit "channel".

C'mon Nintendo, just enable USB hard drives.

2
get2sammyb
Thu 1st Nov 2007

Then you consider all the WiiWare games that people are going to want. New Dr. Mario etc.

I think they will introduce one May next year. Or just allow for USB hard drives.

3
Dazza
Thu 1st Nov 2007

This is a very short sighted statement. A HDD is really needed soon. TG16 CD, Neo Geo and N64 games are gonna eat up the internal memory VERY quickly.

Even if they just did a firmware update to allow games to be played directly from a 2GB SD card it would improve things.

Delete and download when you want to play. Yeah right, that's what I always do with my iPod!!!

4
robwho2
Thu 1st Nov 2007

I have an 80GB iPod, I delete nothing!

5
Zenman
Thu 1st Nov 2007

why not? cant you just hook up a standard USB hard drive, i mean the have no OS when you get 'em

6
get2sammyb
Fri 2nd Nov 2007

Presumably they will do a firmware update to allow for USB hard drives. I don't care what they're saying in this statement - with the introduction of Wii Ware it will happen.

7
robwho2
Fri 2nd Nov 2007

Zenman, drivers are required in order to recognise the hard drive in the first place though.

8
Masterless
Fri 2nd Nov 2007

Most drives are plug and play, I'm sure it will cross over to the Wii. An official drive would be easy and it would make them money so I can't see why not.
Do we think Nintendo actually believe what they are saying? That people want to waste time and bandwidth redownloading games they have already downloaded before. Delluded Nintendo as usual; they really have no sense when it comes to online. "People don't want online games"...